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The Threat:Null thing is from the Void Engineers splatbook that came out in something like 2013 from Onyx Path, with a solid ten-year gap between it and any other Mage supplements from 3rd edition. The real short version is that 3rd edition included something called the "Avatar Storm," which cuts mages on Earth off from the spirit world, and also cuts anyone who was in the spirit world at the time off from Earth. Humans without that connection can handle being in the spirit world for maybe three months tops before they start to become spirits themselves, and one of the big flaws of the Technocracy is that they don't actually believe in the concept of a "spirit world." But it believes in them. Since the oldest and most powerful mages in the setting tend to go on retirement tours to the spirit world, various custom-built realities within the spirit world, and/or deep space, that meant most of those mages either died or became spirits. In the case of the Technocracy, that means the leadership of four out of its five major factions got stuck off Earth for long enough to get real weird. Hence, they became Threat:Null, which is the ultimate dark expression of each of those four factions' ideals (be careful what you wish for, etc.), combined with an Orwellian drive to forcibly subsume or destroy anyone who isn't part of their deal. Worse, because the Technocracy low-key brainwashes each of its operatives, any Earth-bound Technocrat who comes into contact with any element of Threat:Null will become one of them on the spot, as the indoctrination sets them up for rapid conversion. It's an interesting idea for an antagonist and you could get a lot of use out of them, but like I said, it's from a pretty obscure source. fool of sound posted:Honestly I find that old mage better reflects the tendency for real world occult and pagan revivalists to imagine themselves as ideologically superior to existing systems of power when there isn't actually any reason to believe that they're not just a different flavor of the same basic thing Yeah, I almost wrote something about this before. All of the original, first edition White Wolf games have the same problem, and that's Mark Rein-Hagen's weird ideas about what a roleplaying game actually entails. He never seemed to understand in any of the 1st-edition books that a tabletop game isn't going to be this perfect crystal castle of ideas that the ST and players will collaborate upon in order to tell a story of an individual's struggle against damnation/rage against the inevitable/etc. For example, both Vampire and Mage have an included gradual struggle towards theoretical, spiritual perfection that's treated as a character's ultimate endgame, but which is an individual goal that's difficult if not impossible to convey at a gaming table with other players involved. It's not until other writers get involved that the game line starts evolving any degree of mechanical consistency or textual consistency. Rein-Hagen is good at ideas, bad at worldbuilding and mechanics, and it's why the oWoD is built on as much sand as it is.
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Jul 30, 2021 16:52
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Ferrinus posted:The Traditions, plural, are now an ecumenical organization dedicated to human liberation rather than to specifically the church of Rome or whatever. [Citation needed] quote:But if you're like "who is feeding people [after the end of capitalism]" they've already got you. Worrying about and improving material conditions is a primary concern of leftist thought. Does hunger simply not exist without capitalism? Do material needs just get magicked away? quote:Phil 'Satyros' Brucato doesn't have a good understanding of the setting they're letting him work on. Brucato was the primary designer in charge of 2e, Revised, and M20. Who is "they"? Stewart and Stephen Wieck? Chris Early? Chris Hind? Mark Rein•Hagen?
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Jul 30, 2021 17:08
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Ferrinus posted:First, lots of real-life leftist factions - and certainly the materially successful ones - are organized hierarchically. If you think the problem is "hierarchy" rather than capitalism you've already been fooled by liberal ideology. You're forcing a reading where Technocracy = Capitalism but the NWO was explicitly involved in the Soviet Union too, and their whole deal is basically being the bad kind of hierarchy. If you want the Technocracy to just be Capitalism in your games, that's fine, but it's not textual (or else the entire Union would be the Syndicate), and I think any kind of end of history triumphalism, whether ML or liberal, fits pretty well with a Technocratic idea of progress. With communism they just make sure nothing ever gets past the vanguard stage, which conveniently matches up with real life.
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Jul 30, 2021 17:11
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Yeah, Ferrinus has a better take on the Traditions as they exist than Brucato. Probably because he actually read the books while I think Brucato just ignored everything written after his tenure, as well as mentally rewriting stuff he helped write himself during the 2e days. Mage: the Sorcerer's Crusade is probably the best version of oMage, and it shows that the Traditions were never in charge. The closest you got are the Hermetics, the Wu Lung and the Ngoma and even then they functionned within their society and were bound within those societal norms. Hermetics were powerful and influential but were still bound by the medieval order of things with the CHurch and the Nobility, the Wu Lung bowed to the Emperor and so on. In fact, the idea of shaping reality to assert your perfect Utopia didn't exist before the Order of Reason! They changed the game! Mages before them thought they were discovering secret knowledge, not changing reality to fit their views. But that fight is as old as Mage itself. Not helped by the fact authors also disagreed and so you get lots of books contradicting each other.
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Jul 30, 2021 17:14
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Toph Bei Fong posted:[Citation needed] The... entire line? Like, the Traditions are actually, factually an alliance of disparate religions (and non-religions). They're made up predominantly if not completely of modern-day people - even old traditionalists are old in the sense of being boomers, not old in the sense of being methuselahs. They're all live-and-let-live with each other, but the Technocracy is live-and-let-live with nobody, because capitalism abhors any time, space, or society that has not been assimilated into capitalism. quote:Worrying about and improving material conditions is a primary concern of leftist thought. Does hunger simply not exist without capitalism? Do material needs just get magicked away? Hunger definitely existed before capitalism, such that the development of the Order of Reason and of capitalism generally was a historical necessity. Don't get me wrong - I don't think it's bizarre or regrettable or something that the Craftsmasons developed how they did, or an actual problem that thanks to the development of productivity and technology etc. we now live in a single globalized world or whatever. But, a few points: First, one of the reasons hunger existed before capitalism is that the disparate magical Orders whose descendants would eventually become "The Traditions" simply didn't care about normies. People like to talk about the Traditionalists ruling as sorcerer-despots, but the actual history was more like they ignored people and did nothing to protect them. So of course they were going to lose to a magical faction that actually satisfied the material needs of regular people and was able to marshall popular power behind itself. Second, yes, material needs get magicked away. Like, literally, that is the Order of Reason's claim to fame: they actually used magic (which is to say, a combination of ideological training and the deployment of specialized knowledge) to solve such things as hunger, pestilence, attack by predators, etc. Nowadays, of course, it's the opposite: why is there world hunger, despite us producing more than enough food to feed everyone? Capitalism! Why is there an ongoing pandemic, despite the measures that we would've needed to prevent its spread having been widely known at its very outset? Capitalism! Etc. So the Technocracy has long since outgrown its usefulness, and is now a blight on humanity rather than its savior. As a mirror of this, the Traditions have become our way forward even though they used to suck and indeed still contain many lovely elements. To quote a famous political theorist, you go to war with the army you have. Sinteres posted:You're forcing a reading where Technocracy = Capitalism but the NWO was explicitly involved in the Soviet Union too, and their whole deal is basically being the bad kind of hierarchy. If you want the Technocracy to just be Capitalism in your games, that's fine, but it's not textual (or else the entire Union would be the Syndicate), and I think any kind of end of history triumphalism, whether ML or liberal, fits pretty well with a Technocratic idea of progress. With communism they just make sure nothing ever gets past the vanguard stage, which conveniently matches up with real life. The NWO was certainly "involved" in the Soviet Union, but, notably, the Soviet Union fell and fractured into a bunch of capitalist states all under the Technocracy's watch. It's important to understand, though, that as a literary element the Technocracy isn't an illuminati conspiracy that likes really-existing capitalism and so works behind the scenes to protect really-existing capitalism. It is capitalism, or rather a metaphorical stand-in for it. It does the stuff capitalism does, it has problems akin to capitalism's, it has a history akin to capitalism's, etc.
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Jul 30, 2021 17:25
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Ferrinus posted:[Snip] I like your vision of the game as an optimistic enlightened Marxist revolution much better than the one that was printed by White Wolf. edit: to expand on this a bit, an analogy: I like X-Men comics. I think they're a fun and interesting and flexible idea. I could name off many runs and writers that I really enjoyed. But, also, I could talk about runs which didn't get it, were made by old writers returning to material they had aged out of, and ones which are downright offensive. So, if I were to speak about X-Men being good in any sort of long form sense, it would be in a qualified way. "My" X-Men are like this, which involves ignoring these comics which, while published, I think are very bad and don't get at the core concepts that make X-Men good. But it does introduce problems like when someone brings up the salient point "What if the X-Men are a really good analogy for the police, rather than minorities?" and I have to say "Well, yeah, I can see that reading, but I don't like those X-Men runs by writer XYZ and I don't think they understood the concept very well". Toph Bei Fong fucked around with this message at 17:54 on Jul 30, 2021 |
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Jul 30, 2021 17:42
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I would argue that via the Syndicate, it's more accurate to argue that the Technocracy encompasses hyper-capitalism than explicitly represents it. Similarly, the Ventrue in V:tM, being basically that scene in Being John Malkovich except everyone's Michael Douglas as Gordon Gekko, are a decent capitalist metaphor all by themselves.
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Jul 30, 2021 17:54
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Toph Bei Fong posted:I like your vision of the game as an optimistic enlightened Marxist revolution much better than the one that was printed by White Wolf. But that's the thing. It's not what was printed by White Wolf. I mean, if we're talking about homebrew lore and such that's fine but that's not solely what's there in the actual produced product. And I don't know how to say this without potentially catching a probe, Ferrinus, but it's obvious you take an incredibly narrow view of Mage and it's backstory, despite also having a very passionate interest in it. Like, you say poo poo like this on the regular: quote:First, lots of real-life leftist factions - and certainly the materially successful ones - are organized hierarchically. If you think the problem is "hierarchy" rather than capitalism you've already been fooled by liberal ideology. And it's obvious you're impressing your own personal political views onto the setting. Which is fine! Part of what makes the OWoD games is that they are so open to many different interpretations. But that doesn't change the fact that the actual work we're discussing is a bit more nuanced than it simply just being a work-wide metaphor for the glorious revolution against capitalism and the righteous downfall of the liberal ideology. This doesn't mean that I disagree with your posts that the game would be interesting if that's how it was. But I have to question just what you're trying to accomplish by arguing with people (and the statements of a foundational dev going all the way up to M20!) by insisting that that's the only interpretation? I mean, you're more likely to drive people away from posting in the thread by doing that than anything else. Archonex fucked around with this message at 18:20 on Jul 30, 2021 |
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Jul 30, 2021 17:57
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Jesus this is the best thread ever created. God bless Something Awful.
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Jul 30, 2021 18:13
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There's a reason I play Vampire and don't loving touch Mage.
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Jul 30, 2021 18:16
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Let's talk about how Cappadocius tried to diablerize God.
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Jul 30, 2021 18:30
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MonsieurChoc posted:Let's talk about how Cappadocius tried to diablerize God. Nobody tell Fox News about this attempt to attack and dethrone God.
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Jul 30, 2021 18:36
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Shrecknet posted:There's a reason I play Vampire and don't loving touch Mage. A coward's position, Del
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Jul 30, 2021 18:55
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Toph Bei Fong posted:I like your vision of the game as an optimistic enlightened Marxist revolution much better than the one that was printed by White Wolf. I sympathize with your position and probably would've said the same thing years ago, but if we're going to read Mage as a text - rather than just shrugging at it because it's had lots of different writers, etc - we do need to think deeply on it and synthesize it into something coherent, because that's our responsibility as readers and as political thinkers. And that's just dialectics, right? Everything has internal contradictions, and develops as a result of how those contradictions collide and transform. Like I said earlier, I'm a huuuuge Awakening partisan and was much happier to just write Ascension off as nonsense back in the day, but increasing historical and political knowledge really improves both games for the reader and player. Here's a funny story about Awakening: the original plan for M:tAw was that there would actually be a magical war between "The Traditions" and "The Technocracy", but as players increased in their Gnosis and peeled back layers of secrets they'd learn that the real players were the Pentacle and the Seers. Magic vs. science was just a proxy war for domination vs. liberation. ...but that's actually true of Ascension either way, and nowhere do they make it as clear in the actual ToJ "Ascension" book itself. Archonex posted:But that's the thing. It's not what was printed by White Wolf. I mean, if we're talking about homebrew lore and such that's fine but that's not solely what's there in the actual produced product. And I don't know how to say this without potentially catching a probe, Ferrinus, but it's obvious you take an incredibly narrow view of Mage and it's backstory, despite also having a very passionate interest in it. You're also impressing your own personal political views onto the setting, specifically a mealy-mouthed liberal third campism. The question is, whose politics are better represented such that they make for a more coherent reading of the game as a work of art? The answer is, mine. If you don't think the Technocracy is a proxy for capitalist hegemony as such, if you think the Traditions are actually just as bad or bad enough that there's really a no clear good guy or bad guy, if you think the Pentacle is actually bad enough that there's not a clear good guy or bad guy in Awakening, well, you should be able to make the argument. But you don't seem to be doing that. Instead, you're complaining that here, in this forum, things are being debated and discussed.
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Jul 30, 2021 19:10
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MonsieurChoc posted:Let's talk about how Cappadocius tried to diablerize God. Aside from the topic in question, Voormas from Mage poisoned the concept of necromancy somehow to make those that got strong enough in it become pushed towards triggering the apocalypse by causing some sort of hosed up planemeld type event where the underworld would merge with the living world and the platonic concept of death would overwrite mortality or some crazy bullshit like that. Basically, Voormas took a page out of Exalted (Have I mentioned that Exalted was supposed to be the forgotten prehistory of the setting? Because these nebulous references to it are all over the place.) and apparently nebulously poisoned the death oriented magic of the setting so that people that use it are pushed towards loving up reality without realizing it if they aren't given a heads up about this. Also, he's some sort of weird tantric sex practitioner that can do magic by boning and...Well, look, any summary of Voormas inevitably devolves into coming off like someone wrote up a major OWoD antagonist that was supposed to be really edgy and metal while on some really heavy drugs. Let me just post a few comparatively short tracts of his official wiki summary and you'll get the idea of what I mean. quote:At the behest of powerful spirits who claimed to be Kali and Shiva, Voormas had gathered the powers of death and misery and used them to fuel the dark essence of his Realm. Over the time, the House of Helekar turned into a bone-dusted shrine to depravity and pain. Voormas sheltered the Realm's true nature and purpose for 200 years. Blackmailing Doissetep's finest granted him access to some of the foulest Nodes in the Tellurian. Studying the old secrets of the Idran, he tried to command the raw Entropy of these places. He wanted to master Death itself – the one thing he still feared after centuries as a Chakravanti. The gods appeared to him then and told him that true Living Death could only be achieved when the whole cosmos was united by annihilation. I could go on, but his his story just keeps getting more and more over the top until he starts to resemble some sort of weirdly pseudo-psychosexual death and apocalypse obsessed villain from Exalted. Just read the summary the official wiki has if you're interested in it. https://whitewolf.fandom.com/wiki/Voormas So yeah, given all that i'd say the tragedy of Cappadocius is that while he may have been a decent man (Highly debatable. His appearance in Beckett's Jyhad Diary paints him as a power hungry psychopath more concerned that "his" divinity was denied to him instead of more pressing matters like, say, his clan having been slaughtered by traitors or the fact that he is literally dead and a ghost.) at one point that was pushed into insanity, no one knows that bit about Voormas in VtM. Meaning everyone that survived the purge thinks of him as a monster solely of his own making with delusions of grandeur. Also, unless god happens to be the Ebon Dragon part of the Shadow of all Things from Exalted (Also something that was a thing at one point.) or the Dark Mother is the one from Exalted it's doubtful he was going to even find god to diablerize in the Underworld. So there's good odds the guy was seriously barking up the wrong tree by looking in the underworld for god. Of course, there's another possible story to his plans in that Jyhad Diary book that suggested that the diablerize god thing could have been a cover for a far more worldy and nightmarish attempt to murder or diablerize all vampires so as to empower himself into destroying the Shroud or something like that. Alternatively, it's possibly the Giovanni that tricked everyone up to try and do the aforementioned genocide to tear down the shroud thing once Cappadocius was gone. I can check out the finer details when I get a chance. Anyways, all that also means that any other necromancers that get strong enough are potentially on track to make the same mistakes. And see that bit about the Giovanni for why that's bad. Turns out a world that is riddled with conspiracies and secret societies with actual supernatural power ends up with a lot of very dangerous secrets leading to potentially apocalyptic events. Many of which could have been entirely avoided if the world was less of a rat trap of secrets and lies. Probably a meta narrative you could apply to real life there, but it'd be a bit weird I imagine. At the very least it goes a long way to explaining the Feast of Folly and other similar events he perpetrated towards the end of his life. Not sure how much it has to do with politics and the thread topic aside from a meta narrative that says that conspiracies are bad for everyone though. 
Archonex fucked around with this message at 20:33 on Jul 30, 2021 |
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Jul 30, 2021 19:23
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The thing about Voormas is that he's pretty much a Marauder, sometimes referred to as such, and is so dominated by delusions that it becomes a reality due to him having Arete of 9, which is insanely powerful and like 4th generation for vampires in relative comparisons. Jhor is kind of the same as Quiet, Mage insanity, but they're bad about describing it as such. Then again that's Mage writ large. You can't really talk about the politics of Kindred of the East because they're bad and pretty racist. It's like a combination of Fu Manchu and some guy on Twitter talking about how you can't bad mouth anime because the Yakuza will kill you because they control the industry. It also combines and mutilates multiple Asian languages in ways that no one probably has before. They seem to be walking away from it in V5 but there used to be a lot of sectioning off the world like it's supernatural cultures were completely alien to each other in ways that don't make sense. For instance there's a separate Shadowlands for each geographic area and it doesn't really make sense for a lot of reasons.
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Jul 30, 2021 19:47
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I get why every vampire around the world being descended from the Biblical Cain struck them as being disrespectful, but yeah I think trying to create a separate distinct cosmology just for Asia as a continent was pretty misguided (though if you wanted to be slightly more charitable I guess you could handwave it as a consensus reality deal and that just being the main place on the planet where Abrahamic beliefs aren't dominant), and then topping it off with the Asian vampires invading the United States to do reverse colonialism was kind of hilarious. I really think they had good intentions, but blundered into so many things that were questionable even at the time and look even worse in retrospect.
Dr Kool-AIDS fucked around with this message at 20:01 on Jul 30, 2021 |
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Jul 30, 2021 19:55
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I'm only going on the Mage second ed corebook and some novels I read a long way back, so I sure can't speak to the setting as a whole. But if I was supposed to read that corebook as the capitalists versus the plucky morally ambiguous underdogs then I have the same problem with it that I do new Shadowrun: insofar as it's critiquing capitalism, the critique isn't great. The story presented is that material conditions are bad because a shadowy cabal of people at the top holding power have consciously decided to make/leave it that way, not because of a systemic issue. It's explicit in the book that their goals were good, but the people at the top got greedy (helped along by the actual objectively evil wizards) and gave up on them. And so,Ferrinus posted:It's important to understand, though, that as a literary element the Technocracy isn't an illuminati conspiracy that likes really-existing capitalism and so works behind the scenes to protect really-existing capitalism. It is capitalism, or rather a metaphorical stand-in for it. It does the stuff capitalism does, it has problems akin to capitalism's, it has a history akin to capitalism's, etc. this would be the part where I don't follow. I mean, the text quite pointedly says that their current goals are (1) control of everything, and (2) equality, even if it means cutting down those at the top. It then specifically describes their ideals as a warped form of communism, with the contradiction being that elites have to be there to impose that equality, drawing a comparison to the Soviet Union. The much more natural read of it to me is as a libertarian-ish spin on evil manipulative big government, with the bad guys being a pastiche of different flavors of The Man. If there's stuff in other books where they demonstrate systemic contradictions analogous to capitalism, hey, cool, I don't know a lot about the setting. But I don't think it's fair to say I "failed the test" the book puts before me if I read the side it calls communists to be something other than a representation of capitalism. e: if this is a "the author actually made a point way different from their apparent intent" kinda take, okay, but I didn't read you to be making that argument. eviltastic fucked around with this message at 20:45 on Jul 30, 2021 |
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Jul 30, 2021 20:18
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Yeah shadowrun too spends a lot of time confusing its own message by making the evils of capitalism a product of, at best, megalomaniacal schemes gone wrong or outright illuminati groups, or at worst completely alien forces of spiritual evil. It focuses a lot on the people who have fallen into the cracks of capitalism; the destitute, gangs, and organized crime, as the victims of capitalism, while regarding workers with contempt for upholding the status quo, rather than victims in their own right. They call them wageslaves but don't examine what that means; it means that cybernetics and downloadable educations makes workers entirely interchangeable, they don't even have their own skills to market, they're just fleshy platforms for hardware and software with no hope for anything better.
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Jul 30, 2021 20:46
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eviltastic posted:this would be the part where I don't follow. I mean, the text quite pointedly says that their current goals are (1) control of everything, and (2) equality, even if it means cutting down those at the top. It then specifically describes their ideals as a warped form of communism, with the contradiction being that elites have to be there to impose that equality, drawing a comparison to the Soviet Union. The Technocracy didn't get particularly layered until much later in the line. In the second edition core rulebook, they're antagonists, full stop. Your reading's perfectly valid given what you had access to.
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Jul 30, 2021 21:09
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eviltastic posted:this would be the part where I don't follow. I mean, the text quite pointedly says that their current goals are (1) control of everything, and (2) equality, even if it means cutting down those at the top. It then specifically describes their ideals as a warped form of communism, with the contradiction being that elites have to be there to impose that equality, drawing a comparison to the Soviet Union. Some others for sure ended up making a point different than they intended, because Mage has had a lot of writers and been given a lot of spins over the course of its life. Like, the Technocracy is just chock full of what, when you get down to it, is antisemitism - they literally, actually try to control you by putting fluoride in the drinking water and all the other Alex Jones poo poo. Obviously, really-existing capitalism doesn't involve mind control rays. ...on the other hand, it does involve 24/7 advertising and propaganda broadcasts. So all this stuff loops back around. For better or worse, the Technocracy is hegemonic western modernity, and that's totally inseparable from the capitalist mode of production. All the crazy conspiracy theories and equivalences drawn by prisoners or victims of capitalism appear "for real" in the Technocracy, but it's for the same reason that they appear in real life as content on Youtube and Twitter. This nonsense is just automatically and spontaneously generated by the world we live in and that world is riveted by iron chains to production for exchange-value rather than for use-value. As to (2), even that's characteristic of liberal capitalist hegemony, which, on the one hand, is a powerfully rationalizing and flattening force that dissolves all distinctions and identities and will supposedly bring about a world of perfect liberty and freedom from want (this is also claimed by anarchism, communism, and other ideologies so there's nothing that special about it) but at the same time is a powerfully striating and tiering force that produces and reproduces gender, race, etc. Of course, history never actually ends, so the Technocrats can asymptotically approach their utopia but their internal contradictions will never let them reach it. I would only accuse you of having "failed the test" if you took a look at Mage and were like, "well, these Technocrats and these Traditionalists, they're not so different, who knows who's in the right, really."
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Jul 30, 2021 22:28
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RocknRollaAyatollah posted:You can't really talk about the politics of Kindred of the East because they're bad and pretty racist. It's like a combination of Fu Manchu and some guy on Twitter talking about how you can't bad mouth anime because the Yakuza will kill you because they control the industry. It also combines and mutilates multiple Asian languages in ways that no one probably has before. i don't understand why we wouldn't dish on this as powerfully as possible creepyass orientalism and asian stereotyping is actually what keeps the pc game Bloodlines from being something i can conscientiously call a timeless gem. oh no, it's got some time on it. the whole chinatown part and its depiction of eastern cultures aged like milk and dogs the game's legacy fun to hear about why this was what it was, too, just dissecting these writers
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Jul 30, 2021 23:28
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Wanderer posted:The Threat:Null thing is from the Void Engineers splatbook that came out in something like 2013 from Onyx Path, with a solid ten-year gap between it and any other Mage supplements from 3rd edition. Threat:Null in Technocracy: Reloaded. So Mage 20th Anniversary Edition is essentially what I'm going to call Mage 4th edition. The 20th Anniversary Edition update to Guide to the Technocracy is the book Technocracy Reloaded, released about a week ago (there was a kickstarter for it). Threat Null is one of the antagonists given in the metaplot chapter. They describe Threat Null as essentially what Wanderer posted, but they also include a couple of variants in case that is what you want for your campaign. The authors also say the following about the aim of Threat Null "One theorized goal of Threat Null is not destruction, but protection taken to the extreme. Having seen the excesses of the Deep [the Deep Umbra, where the collective unconsciousness of Humanity literally comes alive], it wishes to protect humanity; it wants a single unified consensus and is willing to do anything to achieve this aim. How each Convention within Threat Null approaches this goal may vary and even appear counterproductive to another Convention, even as Conditioning compels them to cooperate with one another." Marauder Null "In this variant, Threat Null is effectively a massive fusion of Marauders (see Mage 20 p. 238) sharing a Technocratic Quiet. Their joint delusion is reinforced through social conditioning performed by the highest ranking members of Threat Null. This presents an option in which Threat Null stands as a cautionary tale to any Technocrat gladly eschewing all individuality in the name of conformity to the Union. Conformity taken to excess leads to madness and a desire to subsume the universe to one will. Such is the goal of Threat Null in this scenario." Threat Caul "This variant plays into other potential metaplots regarding the Fallen Technocracy. In this option, a mass corruption running through high-ranking Technocrats in the Void led to the formation of Threat Null. This could have begun with the Incarnae of Authochthonia guiding the entire realm into the Caul, or perhaps with members of Control realizing the statistical inevitability of the heat death of the universe and deciding to throw in on the side of Entropy in the war for reality. Who fell first is academic at best. The corruption has spread, the most powerful parts of the Union are now Nephandi, and they will not stop until the Tellurian has been homogenized for easy digestion by the Things That Should Not Be." So Threat Caul has a lot of Mage speak so I'll translate it for this discussion. If the Marauders are what happens to a Mage when he loses his grip on reality and goes nuts, then a Nephandi is sort of an inverted Mage. They reject seeking Ascension (uplifting society) for the Masses (non-Mages) and would rather turn into Lovecraftian cultists by worshiping entities of pure Entropy, who want to destroy the universe in some fashion. So the Threat Caul variant makes the higher levels of the Technocracy an essentially doomsday cult. Control Control is an entity that shows up in the Technocracy and sometimes talks to Technocrats. It was introduced (I think) in Guide to the Technocracy (which is Mage 2nd edition, Guide to the Technocracy was published in 1999, Mage Revised ie 3rd edition was published in 2000). Control was both a Game Master mechanic and a part of the metaplot. As a GM mechanic, Control could be used to be the boss Technocrats reported to (or usually got a debrief from when the players hosed up). As part of the metaplot, Control is a lie. What do I mean by that? Well Technocrats are all indoctrinated to believe that their organization is a hierarchy and someone is at the top of it all, running the organization. And who could this be but the most senior and respected Technocrat? But the truth is there is no one person running the Technocratic show from above, setting Timetables for Ascension and so forth. However since Technocrats are Mages at base their belief shapes reality. Thus Control was born out of the desires of the collective of the Technocrats to have a person (or council) running the show above them. The neat thing about Control is that as Technocrats rise in rank (magical power) high enough they will be subsumed by Control because other Technocrats believe the subsumed Technocrat is closer to the governing body.
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Jul 30, 2021 23:44
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Staluigi posted:i don't understand why we wouldn't dish on this as powerfully as possible So the Cosmology is different in Asia, functionning according to Chinese Celestial Bureaucracy rules, but also with Japan having a bit of Shinto. Back in the prehistory, there were badass superheroes known as the 10 000 Immortals. Eventually they became corrupted and started stealing Chi from people so Heaven cursed them to be living corpses who eat Chi. Those are the Kindred of the East. When you die, if you were evil enough OR died violently enough your souls is sent to the 1000 Hells were you're tortured for eternity. If you managed to escape from Hell you become one of them. At first you're just an hungry corpse, but eventually you'll start following a philosophy that makes you sane as well as helping you become more powerful. And eventually you might even become a Boddhisatva of that philosophy! There's actually different cultures of Kindreds of the East, with different names for themselves (Penangallan, Gaki, Wan Kuei, etc.) but they're not exactly well-researched. Which vampire philosophy is allowed and which is heretical changes depending on country too. The Chinese vampires are expansionists, claiming rulership over all of the Asian vampires, and they came up with the weird chino-japanese word Kuei-Jin to try to create unity. So that's the very short summary. The philosophies are all weird and not exactly well-thought out. Their powers are all over-the-place and vary between broken good and broken bad, as well as costing a ridiculously high amount of xp. They get to go into the Spirit World and the Underworld, they get Totems, they get Rites like werewolves, they have a Shadow like Wraiths: they're basically a weird hybrid of all the WoD creatures. Edit: I have a stupid amount fo WoD knowledge, I even played the Vampire card game for years. In fact, only reason I'm not playing the card game anymore is cause I got no one to play with.
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Jul 31, 2021 01:54
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Toph Bei Fong posted:This is very well put. World of Darkness: And then the metaphors fight each other
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Jul 31, 2021 03:02
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Staluigi posted:i don't understand why we wouldn't dish on this as powerfully as possible I meant mainly in the sense that it’s dumb and mainly that these inscrutable, evil Asians are invading the United States like some 90’s airplane novel and will kill any foreign vampires on sight in Asia. There’s no real nuance or anything to it, which I could be wrong about, but it’s something Onyx Path doesn’t want to touch for a 20th anniversary edition because it’s that bad. You’d have to build it from the ground up and it doesn’t really work in any sense from the original conceit because the cosmology makes no sense whatsoever in terms of what people in Asia who are religious have actually believed in the last 100 years. It’s also weird that the Asian cosmology stuff is essentially trapped in amber to 500 years ago and very specific while the Western one has evolved to it’s own unique thing that has no real basis in real world belief systems outside of broad things like ghosts and spirits. Even Laibon, African vampires, have their own morality system because they’re African but they’re composed of some of the main clans and some African bloodlines probably coming from a main VtM clan. It’s also not like a path other than humanity which you have to be inducted into, which I could be wrong about because it’s been a while. WoD games in a lot of ways are full of low key racist mechanics and metaplot stuff like that, which they do away with in Chronicles of Darkness games. While I don’t think all the writers were outright racist but there’s a lot of FBI crime statistics and not really examining anything beyond a 1980’s high school textbook level with a smattering of the casual racism of America in the 80’s-90’s.
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Jul 31, 2021 04:32
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RocknRollaAyatollah posted:I meant mainly in the sense that it’s dumb and mainly that these inscrutable, evil Asians are invading the United States like some 90’s airplane novel and will kill any foreign vampires on sight in Asia. There’s no real nuance or anything to it, which I could be wrong about, but it’s something Onyx Path doesn’t want to touch for a 20th anniversary edition because it’s that bad. You’d have to build it from the ground up and it doesn’t really work in any sense from the original conceit because the cosmology makes no sense whatsoever in terms of what people in Asia who are religious have actually believed in the last 100 years. It’s also weird that the Asian cosmology stuff is essentially trapped in amber to 500 years ago and very specific while the Western one has evolved to it’s own unique thing that has no real basis in real world belief systems outside of broad things like ghosts and spirits. Laibon are from later in the line and are a better attempt. They are clearly Cainites with their own culture, there's an attempt to portray Africa as a big continent with tons of different cultures, etc. Someone with better knowledge of sub-saharan Africa would be a better reviewer, but as a simple comparison to Kindred of the East it's a much better attempt.
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Jul 31, 2021 05:14
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Bloodlines definitely did its best with what it had to work with when it came to the KOTE and the literal 'yes, Asian vampires are literally invading the United States via California' metaplot that was a thing. I can't really think of a purely bad/dumb character in chinatown, though, lord knows, some of those accents are seriously pushing it. Even so, most of the actual characters behind them are some of the more fun and memorable (in a good way) in the game. But god knows, they're pushing it. Not really any more than Fat Larry, say, or Arthur Kilpatrick, but...it's the totality of it, of the whole area being wrapped up in the 'barely scrutable invasion plan' bit that colors it all.
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Jul 31, 2021 05:46
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MonsieurChoc posted:Laibon are from later in the line and are a better attempt. They are clearly Cainites with their own culture, there's an attempt to portray Africa as a big continent with tons of different cultures, etc. Someone with better knowledge of sub-saharan Africa would be a better reviewer, but as a simple comparison to Kindred of the East it's a much better attempt. Yeah it's much better but Laibon don't have humanity, they have Orun (heaven) and Aye (Earth) which determine how they appear and how they can use their power. White Wolf Wiki posted:The Laibon, as depicted in Kindred of the Ebony Kingdom, use the Virtues of Orun ("Heaven") and Aye ("Earth"), which represent the vampire's spirituality and humanity, respectively. Orun partially governs the vampire's Disciplines and to their ability to resist the workings of hostile magic, while Aye is used to resist frenzy and function during the day. Both of these traits also reflect the vampire's appearance: vampires with high Aye can pass for mortals, vampires with high Orun appear beatific, and vampires with low Orun appear bizarre or even monstrous. The Guruhi legacy (Laibon Nosferatu) are an exception, as their weakness makes it difficult to determine the actual state of their Virtues. A Laibon's maximum total ratings in these Virtues is restricted by generation: Laibon of tenth generation (or of even weaker blood) can only have a total of ten dots between these two Virtues. It's in some regards similar to the systems Kuei-jin follow but doesn't make sense because Kuei-Jin are essentially more powerful Risen and the Laibon are expressly Cainite vampires. The only similarity they have is that low power level Kuei-jin have to eat human flesh or drink blood to gain chi and it's one of the reasons the Kuei-jin hate and look down on kindred. It's just weird and suspect that vampires in Africa have to essentially have humanity (Aye) and the path of being "African" (Orun) when all other non-African kindred start out on humanity regardless of location.
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Jul 31, 2021 06:31
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Also as written the Orun rules don’t work lol. I think the dev just thought it would be cool to be able to follow both Humanity and a Path of Enlightenment at the same time. It’s also noted that non-Laibon can switch to that system and Laibon can switch out, but iirc how isn’t there because lol owod rules.
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Jul 31, 2021 06:41
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I only had a passing knowledge of WOD stuff, mostly through video games. I knew the basics of the Vampire stuff, but reading this thread is the first time I've learned about Mage. Honestly, I feel like blending the two does a disservice to both, because it just makes so many things inconsistent and trivializes so many things. Example: The Ventrue's whole deal is that they are a shadowy cabal of evil immortal businessmen who hold the reins of the world economy in secret. But... uh turns out that no actually another shadowy cabal of plutocrats controls the entire world economy, and that is just one department out of many. So which one is it, guys? It also trivializes the vampires hugely. Who cares about a bunch of petty immoral jerks and their fiefdoms when in the background you have people fighting over the nature of reality?
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Jul 31, 2021 13:07
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Geisladisk posted:I only had a passing knowledge of WOD stuff, mostly through video games. I knew the basics of the Vampire stuff, but reading this thread is the first time I've learned about Mage. This is a problem that was taken to parodic levels in The Chaos Factor, a crossover adventure starring the villainous Samuel Haight, a kinfolk skindancer/ghoul who also has a magic pumpkin branch (The Staff of the World Tree) that gives him mage powers, who is coming to Mexico City to gain the blood of a extremely powerful vampire (who he believes to be a Antediluvian, but is really "only" the 4th generation methuselah Huitzilopochtli, a Baali who has been in torpor under Mexico City ever since the heroic Lasombra travelling with the conquistadors freed the Aztecs from his rule (Yes, the conquistadors are welcomed heroes believed by the natives to be Quetzalcoatl, liberating the Aztecs from their evil "god" in this setting), and who is using Samuel Haight to cause chaos in the heralding of his awakening and planning to sacrifice the 400 residents of Paraíso Vista to Baal. Haight believes that Huitzilopochtli's blood will make him an even more powerful Mary Sue.  According to interviews with the designers, the character was supposed to be a joke about the dumb powergamers who wanted to play vampire-werewolf-mages, but for a joke, he certainly was a focus of the metaplot for a long time.
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Jul 31, 2021 14:25
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Geisladisk posted:I only had a passing knowledge of WOD stuff, mostly through video games. I knew the basics of the Vampire stuff, but reading this thread is the first time I've learned about Mage. From what I can tell the earlier editions at least were written with the conceit that you were only playing one game in a campaign, for all that you could use the same overall setting and tone otherwise. If you played a Vampire game there would be NPC werewolves and mages, but they're not really the Garou or Traditions so much as superficially similar, and the world was really run by Vampires. Likewise if you played Werewolf or mage, there are ancient bloodsuckers lurking around but there they're clearly secondary/subservient to the forces that the PCs are set against. Obviously this all lasted until a game had two players dead-set on being vampires and two on being mages so they had to both be "right" about what's going on in the shadows of the world. But the writing conceit lasted longer, and by the time they really gave up on that they were in too deep to change things much,
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Jul 31, 2021 14:40
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What's with the mummies
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Jul 31, 2021 15:54
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Toph Bei Fong posted:a crossover adventure starring the villainous Samuel Haight, a kinfolk skindancer/ghoul who also has a magic pumpkin branch (The Staff of the World Tree) that gives him mage powers, who is coming to Mexico City to gain the blood of a extremely powerful vampire (who he believes to be a Antediluvian, but is really "only" the 4th generation methuselah Huitzilopochtli, a Baali who has been in torpor under Mexico City ever since the heroic Lasombra travelling with the conquistadors freed the Aztecs from his rule (Yes, the conquistadors are welcomed heroes believed by the natives to be Quetzalcoatl, liberating the Aztecs from their evil "god" in this setting), and who is using Samuel Haight to cause chaos in the heralding of his awakening and planning to sacrifice the 400 residents of Paraíso Vista to Baal. now get this recorded in a movie trailer IN A WORLD voice
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Jul 31, 2021 17:04
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IN A WORLD... OF DARKNESS ONE MAN.... IS.... ALL THE THINGS
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Jul 31, 2021 17:19
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WoDémon: Gotta Dark'em All
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Jul 31, 2021 17:49
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Geisladisk posted:I only had a passing knowledge of WOD stuff, mostly through video games. I knew the basics of the Vampire stuff, but reading this thread is the first time I've learned about Mage. The "old" World of Darkness lines were similar enough to each other that you could technically cross them over, but formally took place in their own settings. That is, in Vampire, the god of Abraham really did exist and really had cursed you, and any wizards that you happened to run into were just, you know, wizards, probably having obtained their powers by making deals with the devil or something. In Mage, the god of Abraham was but one of many paradigmatic explanations that humans had come up with to explain natural phenomena, and the cosmological constants of the world included things like the "avatar" attached to most human souls, the umbra, the tetrad of dynamic/pattern/primordial/questing essences etc. So these kinds of nyeh nyeh my thing is more important than your thing slapfights were popular to have but formally invalid. In the "new" World of Darkness, now called Chronicles of Darkness, all the various game lines do by default exist in the same setting and are metaphysically compatible (although it's obviously up to the players of any given game which element to keep or discard, what to emphasize, etc - there's a "toolkit" design ethos), but mostly care about different things and have mythologies which either align very sloppily or even seem to contradict. Like, there are several different things in Chronicles that you could call "demons" or "fae" or whatever and it's fun but not necessarily important to figure out if and how they're related (and that answer will vary from game to game). Since all these games are in one way or another about modernity, and therefore about capitalism, they're ultimately different takes on how to survive within capitalism, or how to carve out oases of self-determination within capitalism, or in the most ambitious ones - generally Mage, but sometimes Werewolf and Demon - how to destroy capitalism.
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Jul 31, 2021 18:04
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Toph Bei Fong posted:This is a problem that was taken to parodic levels in The Chaos Factor, a crossover adventure starring the villainous Samuel Haight, a kinfolk skindancer/ghoul who also has a magic pumpkin branch (The Staff of the World Tree) that gives him mage powers, who is coming to Mexico City to gain the blood of a extremely powerful vampire (who he believes to be a Antediluvian, but is really "only" the 4th generation methuselah Huitzilopochtli, a Baali who has been in torpor under Mexico City ever since the heroic Lasombra travelling with the conquistadors freed the Aztecs from his rule (Yes, the conquistadors are welcomed heroes believed by the natives to be Quetzalcoatl, liberating the Aztecs from their evil "god" in this setting), and who is using Samuel Haight to cause chaos in the heralding of his awakening and planning to sacrifice the 400 residents of Paraíso Vista to Baal. Haight believes that Huitzilopochtli's blood will make him an even more powerful Mary Sue. Sam Haight is hysterical because for all of his amazing Mary Sue powers, he Eventually dies, ends up in the underworld, gets soul forged into an ashtray that gets blown into oblivion when the spirit nuke blows up the underworld.
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Jul 31, 2021 18:19
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